Grade 1 Wheel of Efficiency ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Grade 1 Wheel of Efficiency is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Enchanted Gold Ink ×1 and Silver Ingot ×1 — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 9 units, plus 7 crystals.

That bill outweighs 5,492 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 1,090 of the 1,591 Alchemist ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 5 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 3 Water Crystal, 2 Wind Shard, 1 Lightning Cluster and 1 other kind.

The chain crosses two disciplines — Alchemist to Lv 50 and Goldsmith to Lv 23 — so no single class can finish it unaided.

2 of the 5 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Gold Sand (5:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Silver Ingot has the widest use: 157 recipes call for it, spanning eight of the eight crafting classes.